RE: Steemit: What Would You Do If Your Influence Keeps Diminishing Inspite Of Powering Up?
I have seen various bot owners pleading poverty, saying they are running at a loss etc.
IKR! This is just hilarious! I've seen and heard enough on these lines. Feels scammy AF!
I was a curie curator from its earliest of days and for quite a while actually. It was just great fun looking for content and curating it. Those days we did some great things to empower people and build up the community. I was so disappointed when I saw curie loose it's delegation. Now I just look back and say, those were the days! sigh.
So, if we have a look at these points it becomes abundantly clear that bidbots are raping the reward pool in the most cynical way. By preying on the hopes and dreams of people, while facilitating some whales in not spreading their VP around steemit to help the platform grow and sustain growth of everyone.
I've had to junk several of my own projects owing to lack of engagement from the community. I had a strong feeling months ago that we'd be here sooner than latter and it didn't take long to get to stage where bot use is profitable over real content creation. Liberosist and I've had plenty of discussions about this months before it happened.
But with large stakeholders finding the lure of easy money via bid bots the best way to profit on their investment there's nothing we can do. This process of profiting via delegation allows them to quickly increase their stake as well.
It's too bad there's no separate pool for downvoting. If there was, that's something I'd use a lot around here! I'm sure many users would as well.
I wonder if someone can pull the data on how much of the reward pool is distributed purely by use of bid bots and how much of the pool goes to the delegators.
Hi firepower yeah, it is a sorry state of affairs and I'm not really knowledgeable enough about the blockchain tech at the heart of steem to be sure of my reasoning on how this problem could be resolved. In my mind it seems the only way to stop bidbots would be if everyone just stopped using them at once. No profits = no bidbots lol.
But human nature dictates this would never happen. For example, I have hesitated ever making a post about these feelings and thoughts before for fear of a concerted flagging from the people behind these bidbots as I'm trying my upmost the last 10 months to build my rep and position on this platform to a point where I can achieve my dreams of writing and travelling off the back of my earnings. This ties in to what I say about human psychology, people are scared to speak up if they are serious about trying to build their steemit presence, greed + fear are strong motivators/deterrents. I don't know if it could be tackled at a base level, like by steemit INC? I have read a little about hivemind and it seems that it might be possible to freeze bidbots out by the community mechanism, like if hivemind was used in conjunction with SMT's to build dedicated community reward pools (maybe based on types of content, e.g. writing or visual arts etc) and made it more profitable then vetted people of talent to be part of the sub communities pretty soon all that would be left on the main pages outside of these communities would be the mediocre and poor content. However, even as I write this I realize that this idea (even if I'm close to what will be capable with hivemind + SMT's) would be open to corruption as well.
Wish I had been around then man! It sounds like it was allot more rewarding and maybe esaier lol. I'm not moaning at all but curie curating is hard now. I was in among the top 4 in November/December/January but even then it took a lot of work. Now, it is V difficult finding more than 3-4 decent posts/week to submit based on the stringent criteria and my time constraints. I think I joined steemit a year too late.
I think you've hit on one of the problems for community minded people to take concerted action against the negative people and businesses here on steemit. To fight against them you pretty much have to give up your chance at earning much as long as the battle is on.
This is really sad and I know where you're coming from. I recently helped to launch a steemit charity as part the sndbox summer camp final quest challenge and the charities intro post received minimal support. The bulk of it's organic support was from sndbox and I had to go on a big publicity drive promoting it in various discord channels to even get it noticed. I would have done that anyway, but the steemit ecosystem as it is means that the whale/dolphin support just wasn't there as few of them will be looking at the #introduceyourself tag. Why should they bother.
Anyway, rather than end this comment on a downer. I'd be interested to hear your opinion on what I was saying about hivemind/SMT's. As I said. I'm really not that technically minded so I'm not sure I've understood what they could be used for in a community sense and would value your insights :-)